The first day of our cycle of ovulation is right on the first day we have a first full flow of our period so, that’s the day one and therefore, from there on, you can monitor and depending on how long your cycle is whether you get your period every 28 days, 30 days or it can be even less then, you can kind of maintain a diary where you can see where the midline of your cycle or day 12 or 14 is. Some women have ovulation around earlier between the 10th to 14th day of their cycle, some patients may have actually ovulated a bit later on.
To calculate your ovulation date is to get familiar with your body so look out for the signs of ovulation. The traditional signs of ovulation are that your temperature rises post ovulation, that you have increase in cervical mucus and you have more what we call fertile cycle mucus and your cervix which can change throughout the cycle, changes to a fertile cervix and that cervix is more difficult to identify. I’d say stick with the first two. That can give you so much information on when you ovulate and from that, you can calculate around that time, how long you will be fertile for. In general, you want to be thinking the five days prior to ovulation can result in a pregnancy because of the life of sperm so you want to give yourself a nice fertile window that will include the day of ovulation and the 24 hours following.
If we consider the normal cycle to be around 28 days, then ovulation takes place 14 days that is in the middle of the cycle – that is around the 14th day of the cycle. You can calculate your ovulation day counting 14 days before the next day one of your menstruation.
That’s a great question. You can try to calculate it based on your cycle length so if your previous 3 cycles were average 30 days for example then what you do, you deduct 13.5 days or 14 days from your last period so that would be day 16,5 or day 16 would be the date of your ovulation. Of course, that is an estimation: maybe the 30 days cycle average was made by 20 day long cycle, 40 day long cycle and 30 day long cycle so maybe the 4th cycle could be anything. Could be 28 days, could be 22 days, could be 41days so this calculation will only give you a hint.
If your cycles are very very regular you still have 1 or 2 days variability because the ovum lives only 24 hours, you could completely missed it with 1 or 2 days variability you could have one or two days before or after so you have 4 days window that you need to “catch” the ovum. Counting days is okay. It used to be the preferred method in the past: you can find Egyptian wheels of cycle tracking or cycles wheels – this is very ancient. I think we have technology sufficient enough to know it better. Temperature can tell you when the ovulation can happen but it tells you after the ovulation and as we know the fertile days are before so measuring temperature is not so good for this purpose.
Hormone charting is the best way to calculate because you don’t need to do anything. The first part of the cycle is variable, the last part is okay: from ovulation to menstruation it is 13.5 days but the first part is always changing. It can be 10 days, 13 days , it could be 21 days so if this part is changing, you don’t know what is happening if you measure your hormones then you will know when the pattern is coming and then you will know when the ovulation is coming. I would suggest: let’s help you now that it is here. You can do hormone charting at home so just to do that and this is the best way to do calculation.
